The present invention relates to multimedia and telecommunications technology, and more specifically, to communications networks.
In recent years, communications networks have evolved from being static to becoming more elastic and reconfigurable. Generally speaking, elastic reconfigurable networks have the ability to change in response to a changing demand for bandwidth, processing, traffic congestion, or latency, and as such they provide mechanisms for better performance at lower cost. For example, multiplayer gaming systems have varying demands as players enter and exit the game, or as the play progresses. A network that adaptively modifies the available computation and networking resources allows better use and better leverage of capital equipment. Similarly a peer-to-peer network can dynamically add hubs to centralize and optimize network intensive communication and free those resources for others after the demand diminishes.
As new technologies evolve, communications networks are being increasingly used for applications such as multi-party video conferencing. Conventional multi-party video conferencing today primarily relies on Multi-point Control Units (MCUs). The role of an MCU is to act as a centralized bridge interconnecting video calls from multiple sources. Ad-hoc multi-point calls (for example, using peer-to-peer technology) can sometimes circumvent the use of the MCU. However, this comes at the expense of interoperability loss, additional endpoint complexity, and increased use of network bandwidth, since every participant in a multi-party conference must transmit their video and audio stream to every remote conference participant.
Hardware-based MCUs conventionally contain specialized hardware for performing various types of functionality, such as encoding, decoding and transcoding video and audio streams between different formats. In some cases, the hardware-based MCUs can additionally perform various types of value added functionality, such as recording video and audio data for several video codecs. The hardware-based solution provides high performance and high fidelity of the video and audio signals. However, it is difficult to scale hardware-based MCUs since cross-connecting units tends to be both complex and costly.
Recently, software-based MCU solutions have emerged, which aim to reduce the relatively high cost of a hardware-based solution. However, this is accomplished at the expense of loss of fidelity or performance and increased latency. The software-based MCUs retain the scalability limitations of the hardware-based MCUs, but they have a somewhat lower cost of ownership, and may also offer better deployment flexibility.